What’s in a name? Juliet wants to know. You may have had reason to ask this question with regard to your own surname and come to the same conclusion as Juliet: that a family name is an arbitrary denominator. The word name, indeed, is simply a grammatical term for one of the parts of speech—usually called a noun these days—denominating a person, place, or thing. A few of our classier verbs reflect actual surnames. A wonderful word too seldom used, burk (to murder by strangling, throttling or suffocating) goes back to the murderous activities of Burke and Hare in the early nineteenth centuries. This gruesome pair supplied Scottish medical schools with corpses for anatomy classes. Later in the Victorian period a certain Captain Boycott became the object of a well-organized shunning campaign that added a new word to the English vocabulary. I presume it is on the model of burk(e) that the verb bork occasionally still appears in the press. This refers to the techniques used by Ted Kennedy and others to defeat President Reagan’s nomination of the conservative jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in in 1987.
On August 20, 1989 the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, teamed up in killing their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in their upscale family home in Beverly Hills. The weapons used were matching Mossberg shotguns, twelve gauge. Mr. Menendez was shot six times, his wife ten times. If you know anything at all about firearms you will know that a twelve gauge shotgun is a formidable weapon with the power to kill a deer with a slug and the spread to obliterate a covey of quail with shot. I speak of the effect from one shotgun shell. The brothers used shot, some at point blank range. The scene was, shall we say, messy.
This event proved to be a sensation throughout the whole country, but it was of special interest in our town because the Menendez family had for a time lived in the Princeton area. The fraternal murderers had both attended the Princeton Day School, and Lyle had attended Princeton University. Indeed, I had personal knowledge of one of the assailants. When I returned for a second stint as the Master of Wilson College (the oldest of the residential colleges among which all Princeton undergraduates are distributed during their first two years)—this would have been in 1987 or ’88—I was greeted in the pool room by an obnoxious fellow who seemed to think he owned the place. This was Lyle. Lyle did not achieve a Princeton degree, having been suspended for plagiarism; but he continued to like the place.
My ideas about the LA police were molded in my youth by watching Jack Webb play Sergeant Friday on Dragnet. For some reason it took the actual sleuths investigating the Menendez murders a surprisingly long time to do what Jack Webb always did in about half an hour. Before being arrested the brothers had enough time to blow through roughly seven hundred thousand dollars of the family estate and made various improvident investments, including the purchase of a greasy spoon specializing in chicken wings—Chuck’s Spring Street Café—a block north of the Princeton University campus. This place is still going, but only a tiny cognoscenti still refer to it as Parricide’s Palace. Very good wings, though.
When I met Lyle Menendez in the bowels of Wilcox Hall I did not ask him if he was related to the senior senator from our state, Bob Menendez, because Bob Menendez was at that time famous only in Union City, where he was the mayor. I had never heard of him. In fact, I became aware of him only in 2006 when he was appointed to fill out the term of Jon Corzine, who was moving up to be our governor. At the next election Menendez was chosen for a full six-year term. I only sat up and took notice in 2015 during his first corruption trial, which ended in a hung jury. This was more or less business as usual. One of the expectations of living in the Garden State is that one of our major state politicians—impartial as to party affiliation—should be under indictment or threat thereof at all times. The alleged sleaze on that occasion was of the common or garden variety. Not so the corruption alleged by prosecutors in the trial now underway. The operative adjective describing the case might be “bizarre.”
The pay-to-play schemes with which Senator Menendez is charged, along with his wife Nadine who is to be tried separately later, are pedestrian enough; but the details are fascinating. Menendez, who has not resigned from the Senate but has given up the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, is charged with major influence peddling on behalf of three businessmen with ties to the Egyptian government. (There is a sizeable population of Egyptian immigrants and nationals in north Jersey.) The alleged bribes include a snappy Mercedes convertible in the possession of Nadine. More fascinating to the police investigators are stacks of gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cold cash, much of it found stuffed into envelopes and semi-secreted all over the Menendez residence. The senator was born in New York, and grew up in New Jersey, but has explained his curious banking arrangements by alluding to the alleged experiences of his father in Cuba, where his banked money was confiscated by the government. That is, a United State senator, the chairman of one of its most powerful committees, is fearful of the possible confiscation of his money by the government of which he is a member. It is hard to tell whether this claimed fear is more alarming as fact or as fiction.
I have written before about my own brief employment in the Senate Document Room in 1958, in a patronage job arranged by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, then chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. The office joke in that ancient era involved the comparative amatory stamina of Representatives and Senators. The former tended to be younger, and the latter elder. Hence the House has a Committee on Foreign Affairs. The best that the Senate can do is a Committee on Foreign Relations. Get it, get it?
The senator’s lawyers insist that Bob and Nadine Menendez are far from Bonnie and Clyde. It has just been reported that Nadine has received a diagnosis of breast cancer, a devastating development that surely demands universal sympathy. Yet her husband’s lawyers seem to be planning an Adamic defense: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” The claim that the Senator was entirely unaware of dubious or felonious arrangements being made by his better half may seem to an outsider less than chivalrous, among other less thans. But it cannot be wholly surprising. A great philosopher-poet reminds us of a hard truth of conceivable relevance here: “When love congeals/ it soon reveals/ the faint aroma of performing seals/ the double crossing of a pair of heels.”
The presumption of innocence is a valuable feature of our legal system. As of this writing, Senator Menendez has been convicted of no crime, and Nadine Menendez’s trial is in the indefinite future. We cannot apply to the Senator’s wife the unreasonably high standard once set for Caesar’s wife. So, I return to the philological theme with which I began: proper names that have become naturalized in the English vocabulary. However the court cases go, it is doubtful that “Menendez” is likely to become a transitive verb like the monosyllabic burk or the disyllabic boycott. It has too many syllables. The only trisyllable that immediately comes to mind is an inexact but vaguely similar one: to mirandize, meaning to remind a criminal suspect of his specific rights before proceeding to interrogate him. Mr. Miranda was a low-life, all-purpose habitual criminal who died in a barroom brawl, but his name will be forever remembered in connection with our most cherished civil rights.
